filesystemdude

Easy question: I get a paycheck every other week from my employer, Red Hat, who pays me and thousands of other people to build, maintain, and support enterprise open source software.

We're still hiring, by the way.

This.

A Python script is not the answer when I'm trying to do something quick and dirty at the shell.

The beauty of shell scripting is that it evolves seamlessly from trying to solve simple problems at my command prompt. I pipe a couple of things together, and then I realize I could use a loop and a few conditionals, and suddenly it makes sense to store this in file in case I want to do this again. Boom, program done.

It now works on every computer I own.

I love Python. I use it almost every day. But I'll be damned if I'm going to go rewrite every shell snippet I hack together into Python just because it exists.

Different problems, different solutions.

For many professionals your employer will often block / avoid GPL code, tools, and libraries.

Indeed, which is why Linux is never found in a professional setting. /s

Not intentionally picking on Listmonk (or you), but when I hear "alpha-quality code" and start thinking about the complexities of marketing emails with GDPR, CCPA, and the constant threat of blacklists and otherwise getting blocked by big G, I run for the hills.

Arvind Krishna was "Jim Whitehurst's boss" until now

Not true. Jim (and Red Hat under him) reported directly to Ginni. Red Hat was under IBM cloud for revenue reporting, though, but the distinction is material.

I assume if the entire world is spending billions of dollars reworking culture, infrastructure, software, etc., that swapping to making weekly pay the norm is just a bit of noise in that transition.

The point is the flood of the market with these folks' homes.

If there's demand because of a new set of people come by them, that doesn't negate a rise in available properties from which they may select.

Real estate companies make money from the _churn_ of the market, not whether there are too many or too few houses to meet demand.

Our system: I make more, and I pay for the biggest expenses (mortgage, and previously cars and student loans before we paid those off) and have healthcare and whatnot taken from my paycheck.

She makes less but still a decent amount and pay for the smaller bills.

Every once in a while, she'll pay for a big-ticket item (like a vacation or a large house repair) out of her savings, which accumulate faster than mine, to catch up.

It works because we started together with next to nothing, so we're both big savers: Our combined income our first year together after college a little over ten years ago was probably a quarter of what we'll make this year. We both max out (or come very close to maxing out) retirement now. She has more cash on hand because I'm paid proportionately more in various types of stock incentives, so when my incentives vest I tend to sell the company stock to diversify but keep the money in investments).

We live in a small house, no kids, reasonably cheap cars, vacations are often tacked on to work trips to save money, no expensive hobbies.

I doubt I'll "retire" early but our savings mean if I decide to leave tech in a decade and become a woodworker or park ranger, I can with no monetary consequences.

Totally freelance? Not sure. Small teams doing custom site development? Absolutely.

I've seen large companies pay six figures to stand up a microsite, the kind of thing that one person could easily put together in a few weeks.

The catch is that you don't necessarily have a few weeks, you have a few days to go from concept exploration to go-live. It really becomes more about project management than web development in these instances, having a network who you can turn to quickly when you need more hands on deck.

And though I hate the phrase "full-stack" because it means so many things that it sometimes seems like it means nothing, they do really expect a well-rounded technologist.

I'm working with a consultant right now on a web project for my employer. I talked to him yesterday about IE11 fallbacks for Flexbox, proxy setup, CDN configuration, logging and metrics, debugging a custom legacy spaghetti-coded marketing-tech JavaScript, modifying a Drupal PHP module to support project-specific requirements, configuring cron, and a handful of other things, and I fully expect when I talk to him today he's going to have all of those tasks finished.

Those people are invaluable. Someone who can write a little HTML and CSS and maybe stand up WordPress? I'm sure there are jobs for that, but I don't have any need to hire them as a freelancer because I expect everyone on our staff to have those abilities.

That said, doing freelance web dev is _exactly_ how I got my foot in the door with the job I have now. But it paid squat for the time I was doing it, and I hated it because my time ended up being 50%+ of the time running the business side of things instead of building website, which is the part I actually enjoyed.

Amateur is ad hominem, and also simply incorrect.

You're right. I do owe you an apology for that. Sorry.

I still find the circumstances _around_ license discussions like this to be filled with a frustrating amount of amateur lawyering that can be misleading and dangerous. As an open source developer and content creator, I can't tell you how many times I've come across something in GitHub with a "clever" license and thought "great, now not only can I not use any of this, but I see a whole contributor community who clearly believe they are contributing to an open source license when they very much are not."

To be absolutely clear, neither of these "License Zero" licenses are open source or open source compatible in any way whatsoever.

Both explicitly violate the first principle of the Open Source Definition (https://opensource.org/osd-annotated), free redistribution.

We have the open source licenses we do for a reason. They've been vetted. They work. They meet established criteria. It's okay to consider new ones, but the process for that isn't just to make something up and hope it works.

Amateurs have no more business playing lawyer and writing general-purpose software licenses than they do playing doctor and handing out surgical advice. It's not thought-provoking, it's dangerous and harmful to people who don't understand why licenses like this could cause them huge unmitigated legal headaches down the road.

So, uh, generate the power somewhere other than on shady roofs?

Seriously, I don't get the weird obsession with rooftop PV as if it's the only way to be green. PV is great, but, it doesn't work for every house. Personally, I have big oaks out front helping block passive solar windows in the summer, and the peak of my roof runs north-south so cell mounting would be tricky. That doesn't mean I can't get clean energy, it just means I buy it from a utility company, who are buying it from my neighbor's house where the orientation and canopy placement makes sense to do PV.

Huh? SuperTuxKart was initially released in 2007. I recall Linux distributions adding a GUI in about 1994.

Eh, I disagree vehemently with 5).

- A geonerd and open data nerd who working now works in marketing engineering after years of working elsewhere in the stack.

This _type_ of license? Maybe. Depends on jurisdiction.

_This_ license? Probably not.

Making your own license is hard. The best advice is probably don't try unless you're a licensing expert or have unlimited access to one.

I don't think you understand the Linux vendor support model.

The labor isn't "donated" in any sense of the word. It's not like these big companies just pay hundreds of kernel developers to sit around and make commits to whatever they're in the mood to do today.

Clients pay Linux vendors to get the hardware support, features, etc. that they need written into the Linux kernel, and the vendors do that for them. They write the code, test it, harden it, and get it upstreamed so that the client isn't stuck carrying a patched kernel on their own in perpetuity.

It's not the financial interest of Linux consumers (think: banks, airlines, healthcare systems, militaries, cloud platforms, entertainment producers, etc.) to pay millions of dollars a year to have their own in-house kernel development and support team when they can pay a vendor to do it.

It's not just about support in the sense of someone to pick up the phone, it's about support in the sense of maintaining and developing mission-critical software for large enterprises.

And with that, indemnity.

Do your shareholders want to hear that you're working with a tried, tested, trusted vendor to make sure your systems that can never, ever, ever go down are in fact designed that way? Or do they want to hear, don't worry, Dave in IT's got it, he got a kernel patch accepted once? In many industries, IT is just a cost center and a risk. Corporations and governments are motivated to lower their IT-related risk in the most financially-prudent manner, which usually means a vendor.

Oh wow, great.

I'm used to roadmaps and software planning cycles in months or years so "weeks" is probably before I could even get somebody to open an email to start thinking about this. :)

Related (if the creator is still around): Is there a roadmap/timeline for SSO?

I see on Commento.io it explicitly mentions being able to import from Disqus comments, but the "Import from a different service" is behind a signup wall.

Rather than signing up for a service that may or may not work for my site, I'm curious, does it allow importing from existing native Drupal and/or WordPress commenting systems?

That's my biggest pain point right now. Exposing public login to my CMS is a security risk (see: plugins/modules with permission escalation bugs) and frankly a pain I don't want to manage anymore. Migrating old comments to a new system is preferable to keeping the legacy comments system (and user accounts) in place while maintaining a second system on top of it for new comments.

Yes, good catch. "Reactive instead of proactive" might have been better phrasing.

I loved SimCity and it's probably among the reasons I got a masters degree in GIS with a focus in city planning.

It turns out for a lot of reasons, real city planning wasn't for me, though it took that degree and six years on my city's planning board to figure that out. Glacial speeds of progress, a job that's mostly reactionary instead of visionary, "stakeholders" with infinite time to tell you why any change is the worst thing in the world and a conspiratorial worldview - no thanks, I'll just go back to my sims.

I evaluated solar cells for my home, and ultimately decided against because I probably get more total energy saving from the current passive solar of having huge south-facing windows and an oak tree in front of my house - free heat in the winter, shaded in the summer. For solar electric to work, the oak tree would have to go.

That said, central issue mentioned in this article aside (which is legit concerning), cost wasn't really an issue I spent much time worrying about. Am I the only person more interested in giving the middle finger to my corrupt utility provider and their coal-centered power generation strategy than whether I came out a few bucks ahead or behind in 20 years? I suspect a lot of people who install solar have similar motivations.

But that in itself can be a problem, too. The thing that concerns me about household solar is that it's a bit like owning a Prius - it becomes a status symbol for people more interested in _appearing_ green and assuaging their guilt than actual concern about their total carbon footprint. Take a vacation to Hawaii once a year and you'll probably knock off every single bit of good you did for the planet.

Constrained geography is an important part of shaping cities, but it's generally considered by geographers and urban planners to be an enormous positive.

This is a WONTFIX bug.

The ad networks don't care. They're just serving ads paid for by a bidder who very much has decided that you're the target audience. They win when the bidder keeps bidding for your attention.

The bidder, meanwhile, probably has some very good numbers delivered to them quarterly from their ad agency showing that there is a very strong correlation between how they are targeting their ads, and actual purchase intent, and low and behold, purchases! When the ad is delivered relative to your purchase is an afterthought, or perhaps, just not worth paying their adtech people to fix. (After all, adtech engineers are expensive, and whatever they're doing seems to be working, so why change?)

And, the agency who set up the campaign doesn't have any problem cashing the checks for their successful work.

I'm not saying it's not broken, I'm saying the incentive structure currently is not set up in a way that will ever change it.

It's interesting to me that among the HN readership, the majority of the conversation here is either "This is true because it matches my experience." or "I had a different experience and therefore this is false."

Cities and suburbs (and rural places too, for that matter) all fall on a spectrum, and probably a bell curve. People do too. I think too many of us expect happiness to come from the place we're in magically, as if it takes no effort to find it. You still have to work to connect with people no matter where you live, However, this doesn't invalidate the contribution that certain build environments make to loneliness.

Ditto. I tried to write a .pud editor in QBasic in about the summer of '98 or '99, and built a WarCraft fan site for my Kali/Engage gaming clan with entirely hand-coded HTML and some random and probably terribly-insecure cgi-bin Perl scripts for guestbooks and whatnot. I probably learned more from that than any single other time period in my tech career.

Can someone explain what's noteworthy here?

So a platform with only 1% fewer good ideas than Kickstarter?

Okay. So the parent poster prioritizes his kids and family over reading. And you're guilting him for that?

[Citation needed]